The Houston Tech Brief

Construction companies say they spend 18% of project time just searching for data, and general contractors rank data security as their top barrier to going digital. In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief, CinchOps breaks down Procore's How We Build Now survey of 1,005 builders and owners and pairs it with our own Houston Area Security Index scan of 648 local construction firms, where 36% had a leaked employee login ...

Your company's phishing test report shows fewer clicks than last year. That does not mean your team is harder to fool.

In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps, we break down Pistachio's Phishing Behaviour Report 2026, which followed a full year of phishing tests at 648 organizations covering 123,692 employees.

You'll learn: - The three numbers every phishing report should show: click rate, leak rate and report rate ...

Microsoft's September 8, 2026 release carried 974 security fixes, the largest we have tracked. Attackers were already exploiting 2 of them, and neither was rated Critical. Here is why putting off updates is a real risk for Houston businesses.

On August 31, 2026, Texas Cyber Command and the Office of the National Cyber Director launched Project Watershed 250: 12 companies, including Microsoft, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Dragos, donating red team testing, system hardening, and AI-assisted defense to Texas water utilities for 6 months.

This episode covers what triggered it. In late July, a coordinated attack disrupted more than 30 Minne...

A Houston pediatric hearing center is notifying nearly 30,000 people after a ransomware group claimed 540 GB of its data - and it's the third Houston-area healthcare provider tied to a cyber incident in six months. In this episode: the full timeline from the March 2026 intrusion to breach letters 15 weeks later, why ransomware crews are deliberately targeting specialty practices instead of hospitals (hospital-grade dat...

A fully remote company doesn't have a network anymore. It has one network per employee - the home router, the apartment Wi-Fi - and none of them answer to the business. In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief, we break down the 4 things a company loses when it loses the office: the network, the backup fallback, the watchful eyes, and the walk-up help desk - and the specific replacement for each one.

We c...

Somebody on your payroll pasted company data into a chatbot this month, and no tool you own said a word. This episode covers the AI security roadmap for Houston businesses: four phases, in order, and why the cheapest one - the written policy - is the one that protects you least.

In this episode:

• Shadow ...

Houston construction firms just did something nobody expected: they outscored lawyers, CPAs, and manufacturers on cybersecurity.

CinchOps scanned 648 commercial construction and trades firms across the Houston metro from the outside - the same view an attacker has - as the fourth industry in our Houston Area Security Index. Construction leads at a 1.71 GPA, the best of the four industries we've measured. But the win comes with a ca...

This Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps explains why QuickBooks can be fast on one PC and painfully slow on others: the company file is often hosted on a regular desktop that isn’t built or maintained to serve accounting software for a team.

The episode outlines the two real fixes: put the company file on a proper server that’s looked after, or move QuickBooks to a hosted environment where your team connects remotely for ...

Houston added 126,720 people in a single year - the biggest one-year gain of any metro in America. But that is the wrong number to plan your IT around.

In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief, we dig into a Census dataset almost nobody in Houston has read: business applications, county by county. The 10-county Houston metro filed 149,902 ne...

This is the Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps. We published the Houston Area Patch Index, which tracks every security advisory major software vendors have released since January 2022 - a total of 38,446 advisories.

Key finding: in 2026 so far vendors published 7,442 advisories, 4,753 of them rated critical or high. Anything that touches your system should jump the queue, because a medium-rated flaw under active attack is worse than ...

IBM's 2026 Cost of a Data Breach report (21st edition) finds AI on both sides of the ledger: attackers and defenders. More than one in four malicious attacks were AI-driven - a 56% jump in a year - and AI-driven breaches cost about $6.04 million versus $5.03 million for other breaches.

Companies that heavily use security AI saved an average of $1.93 million per breach and closed incidents 65 days faster, yet only 36% use it heavily...

This episode of the Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps breaks down IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report: the global average breach cost reached $4.99 million (up 12% in one year), and the U.S. average is $11.5 million. The episode emphasizes that the industry-specific changes - public sector costs up 37% in two years, entertainment up 31%, and a smaller gap between the most- and least-expensive industries - are the most note...

CinchOps has released the Houston MSP Review Index, analyzing 4,289 Google reviews across 140 Houston-area IT companies with quarterly refreshes. The data exposes rating inflation - 94.6% of reviews are five stars and most providers cluster at 4.8+ - making average scores a poor quality signal.

The report also overturns common assumptions: businesses rarely fire IT firms over technology. The top complaints are billing surprises and...

This is the Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps. In July 2026 Microsoft published 644 security vulnerabilities in a single month, far outpacing prior months and setting a new record.

Across 24 major vendors we track, 2026 patch volume is running about 2.5 times last year’s pace, and the share of high or critical flaws has risen to almost two-thirds. AI-powered scanners are uncovering long-standing code flaws that humans never ha...

We analyzed over 4,000 Google reviews across 140 Houston-area IT providers and found many clients report service declines after mergers or acquisitions. Consolidation is accelerating - Omdia tracked 169 MSP acquisitions in 2025, often driven by private equity.

Client reviews point to five common changes: slower response times, loss of familiar engineers, forced tool migrations, and other service disruptions. If service metrics stay...

CinchOps analyzed 4,289 Google reviews across 140 Houston-area managed IT providers and found a clear pattern. The top complaint - found in 18% of negative reviews - was billing surprises and hidden fees, followed by contract lock-in and poor value for price.

The episode explains why technology is rarely the biggest issue and what business owners should watch for when choosing an MSP.

Before signing, ask what the monthly fee covers...

A CinchOps scan of Katy-area businesses found the metro outperformed overall, but revealed two major weaknesses: 68.6% failed network security and 67.1% failed DNS health. Across 70 firms, 41.4% scored a D or F; law firms were hit hardest on DNS (87% failed) and manufacturers on network settings. Only 7.1% passed DNS health, showing email authentication is widely missing.

The good news: these are configuration problems that are fas...

Most Houston businesses wrongly trust their inbox spam filters while attackers exploit missing DNS email protections. CinchOps scanned 2,420 local businesses and found 59.9% scored a D or F on DNS health, with only 10.2% passing and 68.7% of law firms failing.

The episode lays out the fixes - set SPF, DKIM and DMARC correctly (move DMARC from none to reject), enable multi-factor authentication, and check forwarding rules - and poin...